Saturday, 10 September 2011

I know, I know, the Barclay Bros banned him from the Telegraph and the Speccie for producing much too heady a brew of no-nonsense dry conservatism for the modern pantywaist "centrist" liberal reader, but the bearded mountain man Mark Steyn writes a lot of good common sense from his hideout in New Hampshire. If, like Idle, you don't get bored by drilling down to the pesky numbers, I recommend After America.

Here's a taste:

"The Irish have a useful word for the times - flaithiulacht - which translates to ruinous generosity, invariably with someone else's money. There is nothing virtuous about "caring" "compassionate" "progessives" demonstrating how caring and compassionate and progressive they are by spending money yet to be earned by generations yet to be born"

Thursday, 1 September 2011

"A decent welfare state requires an appropriate balance between carriers and carried. HM Revenue & Customs believes that almost 27 million of our 30 million taxpayers will contribute less than £6,000 per head in income tax this year. Those who have a child in a state school or who make more than passing use of the NHS are likely to be net takers, rather than contributors. So who’s doing the carrying? The ‘squeezed middle’, as ever, will do their share. But those whom we call ‘the rich’ — the top 1 per cent of earners — will contribute an astonishing 28 per cent of total income tax this year. HMRC also identifies a tiny group of the super-rich, upon whom we have become dangerously reliant. These are 14,000 taxpayers earning on average a little over £2 million each. If just one thousand of them were to leave the country, the economy would have to generate 300,000 extra new jobs, paying £20,000 per year to make up the resulting shortfall in the tax take. That would stymie the Government’s growth strategy in one rush to the Departures gate."

Dennis Sewell, Spectator

Vince and Cleggy might be expected to understand the Laffer Curve, but frankly they are not interested in maximising UK tax revenue. Oh no. They want "an important symbolic measure”. I'll tell you what that reminds me of:

Peter Cook-Cable, as an RAF officer, says to the lower-ranking Perkins (Jonathan Miller-Clegg):

…it's a pyschological thing, Perkins, rather like a game of football. You know how in a game of football ten men often play better than eleven?

Perkins Yes, sir.

Cable Perkins, we are asking you to be that one man. I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back.

Read This Book

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WS Churchill's Words of Warning:

"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves".

Too True

"That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era.”

The All-Time Best Daily Mash

Idle

On Limited Government

"We are a nation with a government, not the other way round".

Reagan, inaugural speech, Jan 20 1981

(Interim) Last Word on the Subject

Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.

Prof Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Atmospheric Brainbox of the World